White House nominee for Joint Chiefs’ vice chair backs Pentagon budgeting reforms
Marine Corps Gen. Christopher Mahoney also weighed in, carefully, on whether the Navy needs a next-gen fighter jet.
$750 Billion Or Bust? Trump’s (Latest) Big Defense Budget Bound For Big Fights
Few of the experts we spoke to expect the administration to actually see the full $750 billion President Trump will reportedly propose this week. Between Trump himself calling the figure a "negotiating tactic" and the potential for it driving a $1.2 trillion deficit, the odds are awfully long.
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How warfighters communicate when their missions are beyond visual line of sight
Standoff capability means warfighters stay connected and remain remotely located in a safer environment while making it harder for adversaries to target them.
House Approps Chair Promises Pentagon ‘Flexibility’ On O&M Funds
Legislators will probably loosen some rules on federal spending to help the Pentagon cope with Congress's failure to pass funding bills until six months into the fiscal year. Budget dysfunction has gotten so bad it's forcing even the famously strict appropriations committees to loosen the reins after years of resistance.
Why DoD’s Year-End Spending Needs to Change
As the end of the fiscal year approaches at the Department of Defense (DoD), teams at most defense organizations are working hard to spend all the funds in the Pentagon’s day-to-day operating budgets, which are available for use only during the ourrent fiscal year. To do otherwise, they fear, would suggest that not all available funds […]
Army Commission’s Landmark Report Will Shape Budget Battle
UPDATED: Pentagon official rejects Commission’s Apache plan as “too expensive” WASHINGTON: After nine months of often frantic effort, the National Commission on the Future of the Army delivered its final report yesterday afternoon. Now comes the hard part. It’s 2016, not 2015, that will be the year of the commission, because their 208-page report will […]
Army Commission: Pay More To Keep Apaches in Guard
UPDATED: Retired Gen. Ham Adds Apache Cost Info At Friday breakfast WASHINGTON: The congressionally chartered National Commission on the Future of the Army recommends splitting the difference between the regular Army and the National Guard in a bitterly polarizing dispute over AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. That’s the most politically high-profile recommendation out of dozens, many of them […]
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Meeting Zero Trust goals while maintaining information dominance
Balancing security and access to data are critical to providing users with trustworthy, reliable data for real-time decisions.
Army Commission Drops Hints On Final Report; Reorg Likely
ARLINGTON: As it hustles towards a February 1st deadline, the National Commission on the Future of the Army remains pretty tight-lipped on what it’ll say in its report to Congress. Even our usually savvy sources are mostly shrugging their shoulders. However, the commissioners have dropped enough hints for us to make two educated guesses. First, the […]
Hale Holds Out (Slim) Hope For Sequester Deal
WASHINGTON: The former top budgeteer at the Pentagon says he’s clinging to hope for a sequestration deal this fall — but he admitted the signs so far aren’t looking good. “I’ve got my fingers crossed for when Congress come backs next week,” Bob Hale told me this morning. Yesterday, the former Pentagon comptroller starred at […]
The Hare And The Tortoise: Slowing The Growth in Military Pay, Benefits
Robert Hale, former budget god (comptroller) at the Pentagon, is good with numbers, especially defense budget numbers. And he speaks about them in clear, simply structured and well expressed English. Here he tackles one of the two or three thorniest issues facing the leadership of the US military: how to rein in the enormous growth […]
Sequestration: Don’t Believe All The Hype
Bob Hale regularly demonstrated his better qualities during testimony before Congress, delivering highly complex facts and judgments about the Defense Department’s spending and budgets to the public with a knowing humor delivered with the sort of gravelly voice you’d expect from one of those old country lawyers. Hale served as DoD comptroller from 2009 to 2014, and, before […]
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Data overload threatens decisionmakers as autonomy expands
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
So Many Defense Budgets; So Little Clear Direction
After two weeks of covering the 2015 defense budget, I can assure you it is confusing. Every budget includes fudges, silliness and an enormous amount of information. They are hard to make sense of and often their import doesn’t become clear for a year or two. But this budget may be the most complex one […]
Obama, Navy Lying To Congress On Carriers: Seapower Chair Rep. Forbes
CAPITOL HILL: “I think this is a papering-over of their dismantling of the Navy,” House Armed Services seapower subcommittee chairman Randy Forbes told me this afternoon. “They aren’t having the courage or the straightforwardness or transparency to call it what it is.” Between the Pentagon’s proposed reduction in warships currently in the water and its […]
DoD’s $31 Billion Pay, Benefits 2015 Bet; Hill Asks, What About 11 Carriers?
CAPITOL HILL: Sen. Carl Levin made very clear to his colleagues just what is at stake in the inevitable shout-fest over benefits and compensation. It is the $31 billion saved in the proposed budget in reductions to the rate of pay growth, boosted Tricare payments, and consolidations in the healthcare program, the 5 percent reduction […]
Fox: DoD Gambles On Sequester
NEWSEUM: At first it looks like pure wishful thinking: The administration’s 2015 budget plan assumes the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration don’t go back into effect in 2016, when the stay of execution known as the Balanced Budget Act runs out. In fact, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official argued today, the administration is taking […]